Use the Pixel Caffeine WordPress plugin to create remarketing audiences on the fly

Once you’ve set up the tracking system, it’s time for the fun part – creating new audiences and crafting the remarketing messages that speak to these new audiences.

Rule #2: Segment your Facebook remarketing audiences

One of the biggest mistakes we see companies doing is creating a single Facebook Custom Audience of all past website visitors and showing them all the same retargeting ad.

In fact, your website visitors all have different expectations and intents.

There are many types of remarketing audiences that you can create:

Specific landing page visitors

Your blog readers

People who have visited the Pricing page

People who abandoned their shopping cart

Customers who have already purchased from you

Instead of bundling all your high-ROI Facebook retargeting audiences into one bucket and showing them the same ads and offers, create 3-10 remarketing audience segments, depending on the size of your website traffic.

Next, make sure that your ad offers match with the expectations and interests of the new remarketing segments.

In AdEspresso, you can easily create customer segments with different custom audiences. Using the Asset Manager, you can create new custom audiences from your website traffic. For example, you can create a custom audience of your website traffic in the last 180 days, 15 days, 10 days, 7 days and 3 days.

You can then include or exclude your custom audiences from future campaigns based on the most recent visit, or if the traffic visits a certain page on your website. The possibilities are endless when creating custom audiences from your website traffic!

Rule #3: Don’t forget to exclude converters

If you’ve even been part of an aggressive remarketing campaign, you may also know how annoying it is to see the same ad over and over again. Even after you surrender and click on the ad, the campaign still keeps popping up in your newsfeed.

Once you get a person click on your remarketing ads, they should be moved to the next stage of your marketing funnel and excluded from the current campaign.

When advertising your newest blog articles to a remarketing audience of blog visitors, make sure to exclude the people who have already read the particular article you’re promoting.

This rule also applies to the rest of your Facebook campaigns, not just remarketing.

Always remember to exclude the people who have already clicked on your ad or converted as a result of visiting your website.

Excluding custom audiences is extremely easy to do in AdEspresso. During campaign creation, you can simply select which custom audiences you want to be excluded or included from a dropdown menu!

Rule #4: Create a remarketing funnel

Successful remarketing happens in multiple stages.

A person who started as a one-time blog reader can be turned into a warm lead and then a customer. But only if you’re targeting them with the right offer at the right time.

Which is exactly why you need to set up a remarketing funnel.

The traditional conversion funnel has five stages:

Awareness – people know your product exists

Interest – people get curious about your product

Desire – people start to want what you’re offering

Conversion – people buy your product

Re-engage – people buy additional products

There are different ways to interpret these stages, but the core idea remains the same throughout all the theories.

Once a person has converted in one stage, you can exclude them from the audience and include them in the next-stage remarketing audience.

Rule #5: Match your offers with audiences

Targeting all your Facebook audiences with the same offer is like throwing an empty fishing rod into the ocean and hoping something will catch.

That almost never works.

Think about your Facebook remarketing audiences on the scale of cold and warm.

Cold leads first need to be warmed up with low-threat offers such as eBooks or fascinating blog articles. The same rule applies to your first-time blog readers – you need to earn their attention and trust by offering them something of value.

For example, Hootsuite’s offering an eBook on the latest social media trends.

In AdEspresso, we’ve also run experiments of retargeting our blog readers with Facebook Lead Ads, offering five eBooks instead of a single one.

However, when remarketing to shopping cart abandoners, it makes a lot more sense to show ads containing the exact product the person was interested in. For this purpose, you can set up Facebook Dynamic Ads.

For example, Amazon’s Facebook ad could be directly targeted on the people who viewed the product on their website.

Key takeaway: When remarketing to cold audiences, don’t ask them to buy something right away. However, warm leads can be targeted with “Sign Up” or “Show Now” offers as they’re more aware of your brand and have shown more interest in your products.

Rule #6: Increase your bids for high-ROI audiences

As you’ve learned by now, not all your remarketing audiences are equal.

Some audiences include lukewarm leads while others target people highly interested in your product and offers.

Depending on the buying potential of a remarketing audience, you can bid more aggressively to reach the audiences most likely to make a purchase.

For example, SaaS startups like Scoro could increase their Facebook ad bids when remarketing to warm leads who have already visited their Pricing page.

You’ll know a visitor is more interested in your business and products when they’ve visited particular landing pages or repeatedly returned to your website.

Key takeaway: Adjust your remarketing budgets so that you’ll assign larger sums to capture warm leads and to convert them into buyers.

Rule #7: Bid less, on non-converting page visitors

On the flip side, you may want to lower your Facebook remarketing budgets for audiences that have only visited your non-converting landing pages, including the blog and informational pages.

Don’t get us wrong. You should still focus some of your resources on nurturing the cold leads to becoming more interested in your product. However, don’t spend your entire budget on remarketing to your blog readers.

Looking at your conversion funnel, spend proportionally less on the early stage leads.

Rule #8: Don’t worry about high ad frequency

While it may seem counterintuitive, the efficiency of remarketing ads grows with the number of views.

With regular Facebook ads, it’s a best practice to keep your ad frequency between 1-3 points.

However, we’ve seen some Facebook remarketing campaigns deliver great results even when people have seen the ad for more than 10 times.

As you look at the graph of retargeting campaign’s CTR and CPC results, you’ll see that the cost-per-click only increased at the very end of the campaign, when the ad frequency reached well over 10 points.

WordStream has noticed similar results with their remarketing campaigns: the conversion rates increase as the number of ad views grows.

Key takeaway: Keep your remarketing ads running even as the ad frequency reaches over 5 points. Only pause your campaigns if the cost-per-conversion starts going up too rapidly. This tactic works especially well when remarketing to a small audience of high-potential warm leads.

Rule #9: A/B test different Facebook ad elements

Facebook ad A/B testing is a constant process that you can apply to every single Facebook campaign. This also includes all your remarketing campaigns.

Among other things, you can test your:

Ad design

Ad copy, especially the headline

Unique value offer

Ad placements

Call-to-action buttons

Bidding methods

Campaign objectives

For example, take a look at MOO’s Facebook ad examples – they’re testing various ad designs to see what works best.

We recommend that you start by testing your remarketing ads’ value proposition, creating different variations of call-to-actions and discount offers to see what makes people return to your website and make a purchase.

Hi Karola! This was another knockout post. I’ve already bookmarked this page as well like Patrick did. I want to say thank you for giving me information that I need to run a marketing campaign on Facebook. I love the A/B testing rules that you’ve implemented there in your blog post. How difficult is it to test single elements at a time? I think it could prove very time-consuming if you do this without any analytics tools – what types of tools do you think Facebook marketing campaigns should highlight? Or should I simply go with an established provider of video remarketing content like Treepodia? I’m a little confused about which way to go – go it alone or use a professional?

Great post – I have one question. I am starting re-targeting ads now – Should I start by retargeting to all visitors from the past 180 days or just do the last two days – and keep it running so new visitors get hit with the ad while brand is still in their mind? Thanks

Hi Karola, thank you for the blog post! Do you mind explaining this part? “Instead of bundling all your high-ROI Facebook retargeting audiences into one bucket and showing them the same ads and offers, create 3-10 remarketing audience segments, depending on the size of your website traffic.”

Excellent write up. I think these are the ultimate rules for facebook remarketing as you mentioned the most critical points. Thanks for sharing this valuable information which is very much helpful for a successful remarketing campaign.

Can you please advise what Facebook Ad OBJECTIVE to use when creating a remarketing campaign for a small audience?

Nobody seems to talk about it. I’ve heard that you should use the Reach Objective and limit the frequency to 1 impression every 3 days.

To me, the metric I really want to measure from the remarketing campaign is Purchases, but how can Facebook do that if it needs 50 conversion events per week and my remarketing list is only 1,000 people?

What I would like to know is rather simple… Are we going to see anything more effective than Facebook for video remarketing in the near future? I’m asking this because I realize that various other social platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat, and whether have a degree of success but nothing like the type of readership or interest in Facebook. I am looking for the right type of company for creating effective ad copy and the right ad placement. I read somewhere that many companies offer such services and I’m wondering if you or your readers have any knowledge of what’s the best?

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